[Wikipedia-l] I'm seeing a trend here or How to keep drivingaway good contributors

[lcrocker at nupedia.com]

> There's a rich history from older wiki communities
> and projects that we can, and should, draw upon, just
> as we draw upon existing sources for encyclopedia articles.

>> Maybe.  I'm not actually sure that that's true; Wikipedia
>> is a completely new thing.  It's a wiki, but it's a lot
>> more than a wiki.

> Perhaps, but we're still building on a foundation
> that's largely wiki, and many of our problems have
> also been faced by other wikis.
> There are lots of other sources to learn from too:
> older encyclopedia projects (why did they fail?),
> commercial encyclopedias (is there anything we can
> leverage from them in our project?) and the rise(s)
> and fall(s) of other great Internet experiments
> (Usenet, Slashdot).

I think it's important to realize that we are on the
bleeding edge here, and that the experience of others in
other online communities, even wiki, doesn't necessarily
apply.  First, the idea that there is a "rich history"
of wikis in particular is laughable, unless there's some
definition of "rich history" that includes things created
in 1995, none of which has ever produced a product even
vaguely resembling what we're trying to produce.  I might
apply the term "rich history" to things like mailing lists,
Usenet, IRC, and MUDs; everything else is new ground.

We also differ greatly from a lot of those earlier communities
in that we have a goal: building an encyclopedia.  We are not
here /for the purpose/ of building a community; the community
is just a /means/ to the end of building an encyclopedia.  If
those other communities teach us something about building
communities, that may or may not apply here, because if the
community gets in the way of the goal, the goal comes first.
I think Wikipedia has more in common with things like open
source software projects, in that the community itself is just
a secondary concern to producing a product.  In other words,
we should take our lessons not from MUDs or Everything2, but
from Linux kernel development, the Apache project, Mozilla,
etc.  I think it's worth noting that in all of those projects,
there are security and control mechanisms.

So don't tell me what other Wikis have done--it doesn't matter.
Tell me what other /successful productive projects/ have done.
Don't tell me how to build a community; tell me how to make
the community build an encyclopedia.